Given recent current events, Jill Leovy'sGhettosidecouldn't be a more well-timed book. It's the true story of an LA cop whose youngest son is murdered in Watts (one of the city's toughest neighborhoods) and the dogged detective trying to find the killer.

If one of your goals is to have a cleaner, more organized, and less cluttered home (and if it isn't, then you should probably write a book of your own), consider dropping a very worthwhile $15 on Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

It's technically a young-adult novel, but I can't imagine any adult not being sucked in by the premise of Katie Coyle's debut, Vivian Apple at the End of the World. The eponymous heroine is the freethinking teenage daughter of two extremely devout parents who are convinced the rapture is on its way—

Aside from Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman might be the most famous caped crusader around, and she's certainly the most famous superheroine. But as Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman reveals, her origins might be even more interesting than her travails on the comic-book page.

Dark, witty, and intense, Merritt Tierce's Love Me Back has been earning acclaim for its penetrating insight into the life of a complicated woman. Marie, its protagonist, is a young single mom who's scored a waitressing job at a high-end Dallas steakhouse, but instead of rising high, she self-destructs, falling into a tangle of casual sex, cocaine, drinking, and other bad habits.

Truth is stranger than fiction, as Alexis Coe's Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphisproves. It's the 100 percent true story, sourced from hundreds of original letters and documents, of 19-year-old Alice Mitchell, who planned to pass as a man to marry her girlfriend, 17-year-old Freda Ward, in 1890s Memphis.

When it comes to tales of transgender people, we often hear stories of transwomen (from Jeffrey Tambor on the new Amazon series Transparent to Laverne Cox in Orange Is the New Black), but the stories of transmen are much more rare. Local writer Thomas Page McBee, who was born female, offers an intriguing reverse perspective in his memoir about becoming a man, appropriately titled Man Alive.